


Betrayal

by mimiwrites2000



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Aruani Week 2020, Betrayal, F/M, Flashbacks, Memories, Unresolved Sexual Tension, but not the betrayal you're thinking of, past relationship, slight nsfw, which haunts both of them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:27:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27269443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimiwrites2000/pseuds/mimiwrites2000
Summary: They met in an alley, a narrow, foul-smelling passageway, in the middle of a cold nightA few months later, he found himself walking to that place, the place where his life crumbled and was reborn, and just like last time, she was waiting for him.a journey of lies and deception, desires and emotions
Relationships: Armin Arlert/Annie Leonhart, Mikasa Ackerman & Armin Arlert, Reiner Braun & Bertolt Hoover & Annie Leonhart
Comments: 13
Kudos: 70





	Betrayal

He walked down the street, one street-light bulb was flickering on and off with blips. Loud, tall buildings contouring both sides of the road, fluorescent squares of college students’ rooms queued in lines, inundating the moon’s light. The music gashing from cheap speakers leached out from the opened windows, belching ear-deafening tunes by another random mainstream singer, disturbing the serene night. The startling, overabundant alcohol aroma could be smelled from where he stood, mixed with a suspicious scent of sweat and other things he didn’t want to think about.

It was surreal how this exact same place, a few months ago, was vacant, deserted, abandoned enough to commit a crime and get away with it, a perfect place to find a victim bleeding to death.

He turned right and stepped into an alley, so narrow, invisible to anyone who didn’t know it existed, dumpsters crammed in crocked lines, a black cat jumped from one, sneering at the unwanted invader. A tiny circle of an igniting orange made him aware that he wasn’t alone, that yet again, she was here before him.

“You’re late,” she said, letting out a breath of smoke, he smelled strawberry, adding another aroma to the blend, this type of cigarettes that he never heard of before, with fruity flavors, masking these deathly pillars with sweet, sweet aromas, feigning a compelling innocence.

“I’m not, you’re just early,” he retorted, stepping towards her. Red cascades leaked through the cracks in the concrete walls, smearing the ground, his ears picked up the whiny voices of a victim, calling for help- he shook his head; the red and the voices vanished, he knew he was hallucinating, maybe depriving himself of sleep for the past three days finally exacerbated his senses, or maybe awakened old memories from the depths of his unconscious mind, memories that he tried to bury and forget they existed.

In the reflected light of the moon, he watched how her fingers delicately curled around the pillar of paper, her scarlet-drawn lips circling around the tip, before another cloud of fatal fumes left her lungs. The sting aroma of iron sliced through the air, red, thick moisture oozed from between her fingers and from her eyes, trickling down her pale cheeks before dripping onto the ground, mixing with the excess stench water of botched trash bags, its intense color fading.

He shook his head again, and the blood disappeared, the artificial-strawberry smoke infiltrating his nostrils. He forced his attention back on why he came here in the first place, he promised himself to finish the business, easy and quick.

She lobbed the burnt cigarette on the ground and stomped it with her leather boots, leaving it crinkled-dead on the ground as she took her time striding to him, her arms crossed, and her hips swaying.

He didn’t move, but his eyes caught the rim of her red and black checkered knee-length skirt move from side to side as she inched closer to him. If he doesn’t say anything, he will lose again to her, he will surrender to her touch and get lost in her eyes, so he greeted her: “Annie.”

“Ah, I see you’ve discovered my real name,” Annie mimicked, a smirk in her voice, even though her face was as stoic as a stone, “didn’t like Maddie? I thought it suited me.” She halted two steps away from him, looking straight into his eyes, the only resemblance between them, those ocean blue eyes.

“It wasn’t hard to know who you truly are, you’re not exactly secretive,” He was trying hard to not glance at her lips.

“I am, I am,” Annie contradicted, “you just did your homework of digging into files, or did you…” she took another step, close enough to feel his breath on her face, and she heard his heart racing in his chest, “or did a little friend of yours help you?”

“I don’t need help from anyone,” _unlike you,_ he almost spat out, but he held himself from doing so, he still had a lot to glean out of her, _one step at a time._

Annie raised an impressed eyebrow at him, with a fake preaching voice she praised: “Look at your smart ass, I wonder what else you know, you’re smarter than you let on,” She eyed him up and down, he was wearing a dark blue suit with the jacket on, even though it was a hot, humid summer night, but the upper buttons of his shirt were left undone, no tie to be seen.

“I’m a respected scientist.”

Annie hummed.

“I graduated from Harvard.” He added.

“Same goes for me.”

He snorted, an actual, authentic laugh, she was a professional liar, one who slipped lies as if they were nothing, she could concoct anecdotes that never existed, she could fathom a smile that was no different from a candid one, hiding her poisonous fangs behind her lips, she could cry tears of pain that she never went through, she could feign the role of a victim, lay on the ground in this same alley, drenched in her own blood, crying in soft, hurt moans, praying someone would peak into this unseen passageway. She would mistake a drunk man to be her knight in shining armor, or two college students whom hormones were out of control to be two angels who descended from heaven to save her.

Annie clicked her tongue and pouted: “Someone didn’t do their homework good.” She ran her tongue on the inside of her upper row of her white-pearl teeth, an apprehensive expression on her face, but he couldn’t tell if it was fake or real, “I remember you, you used to wear glasses.”

He froze, his heart skipped a beat and shuffled through the following three.

“You were always rushing from one class into the other, you must’ve had a busy schedule.”

He swallowed.

“No wonder we graduated in the same year, even though I’m a year older than you.”

He remembered, and he wished he didn’t.

He took a step backwards, this closeness to her made his mind buzz with timely-wrong thoughts, things he shouldn’t think about when he was in the presence of _this_ woman.

He cleared his throat, he tapped the heels of his feet on the ground, shifting his weight from one foot to the other: “Technology? Really? Is that what you wasted four years studying?” he knew his words were in vain, he knew exactly why she majored in that, she was the living proof that computers will take over humanity in no time.

That a time will come when privacy will be a fantasy humans can only daydream about, that holding a phone is no different than holding a bomb, a place where all your info rests unbothered, until the delicate fingers of a hacker taps some keys in a remote place, and everything you once had, is gone.

Same goes for teenagers, business companies, doctors, or maybe a conservative, illegal lab.

“I missed my graduation,” Annie dodged his question, her head lolling to the side, her lower lip curling outward.

 _She’s faking hurt, again,_ he had to remind himself, otherwise he would trust her external emotions, “Let me guess, you were busy hacking into a bank or something?”

Annie gasped and put her hand on her chest, right above her heart: “How dare you?! I was beside my father before he died.”

“That’s a lie-”

“How can you be this heartless?”

The crack in her voice, the blip on the last syllable, all was an Oscar-worthy act.

She sniffled, though no tears were seen, before she shook her head and scrounged: “I thought you were the good person.”

For a moment, he wanted to strangle her throat and shake her until everything he needed to know was out of her, to shake off all this charade she was putting up, this charade that got worn out and had holes in it, or maybe it was already shredded from the beginning but he was too blind to see it. He blamed her hands, her soft touch, her moist lips, he blamed _her,_ she was the one who blocked his vision, the one who blurred his world into a dizzy, vast rollercoaster loop, a never ending one.

But this was the end of this wild ride, and he was getting off of it soon enough.

Annie didn’t wait for an answer, she walked past him, but he was quick to react.

With one swift motion, he pushed her to the wall, slamming her back into it, she gasped, and before she could fight back, he held both her wrists above her head, “In a hurry to see Reiner and Bert?” he sneered through his teeth.

Even if it was swift, he glimpsed panic flash in her eyes, and he knew he hit a nerve.

“Looking for your next victim?” He hit the nerve again when he felt her pulse quicken underneath his grasp.

“Says whom? The one who plays with chemicals?”

For the first time since the beginning of the meeting, he heard her tone change dramatically; abhor soaking each syllable, her voice was choked behind her teeth, her breath was hot on his face.

“You can’t get enough, Arlert,” She seethed, venom dripping from her tongue when she said his name, hatred enveloped her first phrase.

Arlert rose his eyebrows, he was trying to keep his cool, to not lose it, so he focused on one thing: “You finally said my name, my real name that you knew from the start, from that night.”

That night, when he found her in this alley in a puddle of red, her limbs twisted in pain. He wanted to call 911, but she didn’t let him, she begged and pleaded with him to not call anyone, tears of implore mixing with tears of pain, merging with the trails of blood on her cheeks, before her eyes rolled to the back of her skull, and her body slackened against his own.

That night, he carried her home, he showered her in his bathtub, cleaned her cuts and washed dried blood off her cheeks and out of her hair, cleaned her clothes in his washer, and tucked her in his blankets, on his own bed.

“Huh,” Annie ’s voice brought him back from the far lane of his memories, “you’re used to being called _Mr. Arlert,_ aren’t you? The way they call you at work.” her nose was pointing to the sky, “do they pay you enough?” she asked, “do they?”

“It’s rude to ask people how much they earn.”

“Or maybe it’s rude to ask people how much they get for altering humans’ genes?”

Her comment threw Arlert off, and in a second, their positions were switched; his back pressed into the wall, the ragged stone digging into his skin through the thick fabric of his suit.

His heart was beating against his ribcage, each beat sending painful jolts into his veins, and he finally saw the fang sticking out from beneath her smirk, that fang that she kept well hidden from him.

His knees shook under his weight that seemed to amplify under her glare, her hands on his shoulders screwing him in his place, and he wasn’t scared because she exposed him, he knew before-hand that she sneaked into each notch of his files and belongings, that she most likely memorized every substance in the countless drugs he made, the names of his crewmates, and the names of the hostages that were experimented on.

After all, one hostage must have meant something to her.

She had enough time to dive deep inside of him; to uncover every secret about him, she had four full months to do so, and she didn’t waste a minute of them.

She slept in his bed for these four months, had three meals on his dining table daily, she no longer was a guest, he got too accustomed to her presence that he couldn’t imagine how he managed to live on his own before.

But here he was, imprisoned in her cage-alike arms.

Annie glided down her hands down his chest, and even though she was no longer pining him down, he couldn’t get himself to move, to shift a limb, or unclench a finger from his clutched fists beside him.

She rubbed small circles on his shirt, watching how the fabric dented under her fingers, and she imagined them on his bare skin, trailing shapes on his chest, on his back, on his cheeks and running through his short, blond hair.

Beneath the shirt, thunder-shaped fire was kindled on his skin in the trace of her finger tips, the skin burned and charred, but he didn’t move, he didn’t run even after she pressed her thigh into his, and he felt a cold, hard thing pushing into his flesh.

Annie waited for a reaction, a flicker of an eyelid, a twitch of a lip, a quick breath, but nothing.

She smirked, so even after he knew she was armed, that she had a gun in her hand reach, he kept his I’m-cool act up, “You’ve got guts,” she said, not backing away from him, but she did lean her weight off of him.

Arlert almost breathed in relief; her body against him was making his already fucked up mind buzz with horrible thoughts that he shouldn’t be occupied with while his life was on stakes.

But he didn’t get to relish in it; Annie stepped on her toes and bent closer to his face, her hands resting on his shoulder once again, though this time her touch was soft, delicate, like a feather, and even though he knew it was hopeless, a tiny candle of hope was lit inside of him, a tiny farfetched wish that maybe, he could get her back to him.

The sirens in his mind belched and ordered him to turn his head away from her, to do something about her, to not surrender, but he was too frozen to oblige; and when Annie brushed her fingers against his lips, these sirens were too loud to comprehend what they were shouting anymore.

“You’re not running, you’re too used to it,” Annie looked into his eyes, and something flashed inside of them, a thing so intense, a thing that was her only fear. She escaped his gaze and averted her eyes, leaning towards the lob of his ear, a smirk pulled on her lips when she got a shudder from him, and she was itching to weaken him further, to make him crumble and bow to her, to melt him into a puddle underneath her feet and watch her reflection in it staring back at her.

She pressed her lips against his ear and whispered: “You got used to _that._ ”

“Stop it.” Arlert teemed from between his teeth, his fists clutching tighter, he thought his fingers’ bones would crush under the pressure.

“You liked it when I called out your name,” she pressed her frame into his, her voice dropping lower, her cheek rubbing against his, “when I moaned your name-”

“Stop it.”

“In _your_ bed.”

His back was as stiff as the stone behind it, the heel of his feet digging into the solid concrete ground beneath, his teeth gritting into a powder, and his breath was quick and shallow, his ears drumming each time his heart sent blood circulating in his veins.

His hands on his sides sweating and on fire, they were near the edge of sprouting up and engulfing her frame, to run them all over her back and in her hair, to feel his skin against her, her body arching into his, pressed into his, his fingers emitting notes from her that were music to his ears.

Just like that night.

“Armin,” Annie whispered, so low, her voice breathy, her fingers trailing down his neck, “Armin,” she planted an open-mouth kiss on his neck, and he trembled, “Armin,” her fingers reached the short hair of his undercut, “Armin.”

“Stop.”

She stopped.

But her hands on him lingered.

Armin, who squeezed his eyes shut, was trying to control his breathing, trying to slow it into a rhythmic melody, but it was impossible with Annie this close to him, he wanted her to step away from him, to let him breathe.

But he also didn’t want to let her go, if anything, he wanted to wipe that ridiculous red lipstick and break the tie holding her hair up in that small, tight bun, he wanted to repeat what he did the morning preceding that night, bring her breakfast in his bed, feed her with his hands, and listen to her story, pausing every now and then to wipe her tears with his fingers, until her tears were spent and her story was told.

He shook his head, _all of it was a lie,_ he couldn’t let himself fall into that deep hole again, it took him long enough to pull himself out from it, _it was all a lie._

Annie withdrew from Armin, and he couldn’t hold back a tiny sigh of relief, but when he opened his eyes, he wished he didn’t close them in the first place.

Her hair was down, and the blood-red lipstick was smeared around her lips in a failed attempt to wipe it off, leaving a trail of smudged red on her sleeve.

He really shouldn’t have closed his eyes, he shouldn’t have given her another chance to deceive him, to curl her snake-tail around the last bit of his senses.

When he looked into her eyes, they were dead, prosaic, and they didn’t suit her shoulder-length golden hair, her angel-sculpted face, these were the eyes of a criminal hunting the only good memory he had of her.

And he wanted to lurch his fingers into her eyes sockets and embowel them of these foreign eyes.

Without breaking eye contact, she reached beneath her knee-length skirt and pulled out the gun he felt a minute ago and pointed it right between his eyes.

“It was a pleasure meeting you,” Annie said, watching Armin’s eyes widen, the truth that he’s living his last moments sinking in.

Armin closed his eyes, feeling the cold metal pressing between his eyebrows, and counted.

One

Two

Three

Blue

Four

Soft

Six

Golden

No, five

Gracious

Seven

Eight

A click of a gun

Nine

“I really loved you that night,” she confessed.

Ten

The cold metal was no longer on his forehead, and when Armin opened his eyes, Annie was pointing the gun to the sky.

And the look in her eyes, a sad blue streaked by darker ocean-like hue, and maybe it was a trick of light, but he could swear he saw them glistening with tears.

“I really did,” She said, before she pulled the trigger, a wire shooting from the gun barrel, clutching into something above with a _clink_ , and in a second, she was no longer standing in front of him.

A minute, five minutes, an hour, or maybe a couple, Armin lost track of time and sense, and he wasn’t snapped out of it until he heard the sirens of police echoing in the distance.

His legs were numb, and his throat was dry.

Armin walked out the alley the exact moment the cars pulled out next to it, he was tired, so tired, he just wanted to go back home and sleep for three days straight, but he knew he won’t be getting any rest for some time.

“Put your hands up!” A female voice commanded, and Armin acted like he was told.

Multiple uniformed police officers bolted out the car, one of them got closer to him, her gun already pointed at him, but the moment she got a clearer look at who he was, she dropped the gun and placed it in the waist belt she was wearing.

“What exactly happened in there? Are you ok?” She said, she gestured for the other police officers to go into the alley. Even though she was much taller than Armin, she had to bend her back to get a look at his tilted down face.

“I’m sorry, I failed, Mikasa,” Armin said, he finally looked up, his eyes looking straight into hers, and he didn’t realize that he probably looked like shit until he noticed her frowned eyebrows.

“We thought something bad happened to you,” Mikasa sighed, “the mic, we could no longer hear you and-”

“What?” Armin asked, his hands already reaching into the fold of his jacket’s collar, before his fingers touched the small circular device.

“We didn’t lose connection, but the sound suddenly got muffled and- _oh_.”

Mikasa got her answer as Armin held up the tiny, wireless device, now covered with dough-like substance.

“Shit,” Armin hissed and wrangled the tinkered-into-uselessness device to the ground, he ran his fingers over his sculp, tugging at the roots of his blonde hair, he turned around from Mikasa and huffed, not only did he fail to rat out Annie to the police, a wanted hacker that they couldn’t catch for years, but this hacker knew all about his plan from the very beginning.

She knew he was mic-ed, and she knew he was there to betray her.

Just like she betrayed him.

“What about the tracking device?” Mikasa inquired, crossing her arms.

“What about it?” Armin regretted the question the moment it left his mouth.

“You tell me, we found it two miles from here down the street, and we were in full panic mode because we had no idea the whereabout of you and her.”

“Oh…” Armin’s mind was short-circuiting with all the excuses he prepared for this question, but unlike when he first thought of them, now they sounded lame and unreal.

“Besides,” Mikasa took a step closer to him, looking around, making sure that her words were audible to only him, “what’s going on between you two?”

Answers rolled in his head one by one.

Lovers? No, too cheerful, too innocent.

Friends? Friends don’t strip you and fuck you senseless.

Enemies? That’s a strong term to describe what they had.

“I was behind her father’s death,” he didn’t choose to say it, nor did he think of it, it just slipped off his tongue.

Mikasa’s eyes widened, she blinked, and crooked her head to the side, as if waiting for Armin to tell her it was all a joke of some horrible sense of humor.

When he didn’t budge, she inched closer to him and whispered: “Does anyone know about it?”

Armin shook his head.

“Let’s keep it that way, you already have enough on your shoulders, and you breached our contract; you get her, we let you go, but if you don’t…” Mikasa sighed and pulled out the cuffs hanging from her waist, and Armin, without questioning it, held out his hands to her, “Armin Arlert, you’re under arrest for helping out a wanted criminal, and for illegal experiments in an unauthorized lab.”

Armin let out a slow, long breath; even though his life technically was over, and his career had turned into dust, a sense of relief washed over him.

All of it was over.

No more stressing out about being caught, no more pressure to keep working from the shadows.

He knew this would happen one day; he knew it too well.

It was just a matter of time.

Guilt gnawed at his stomach as he saw disappointment in Mikasa’s eyes, his childhood friend taking his hand and guiding him to prison, the place where he would most likely spend the rest of his life in.

How ironic.

She opened the passenger door of the police car for him, he got in and before she closed the door she whispered: “Don’t worry, I got you.”

Mikasa tapped on the car’s roof, and the wheels started spinning; Armin in the backseat, his hands cuffed, and a police officer taking him to wherever next was to happen to him.

Armin threw his head back and let out a groan, he fluttered his eyes shut, trying to let the events of this one night to sink in, this was all just a nightmare, an actual real life nightmare that he was trying to avoid it for the past nine years or more, but here he was in the back seat of a police car, alone, waiting for whatever the next days held for him-

Wait

He was alone.

In the backseat.

Who in hell would let someone under arrest alone in a car with just one police officer, who had their hands full with driving?

Armin looked into the rear mirror and was met with piercing blue eyes, already watching him.

Ones that were similar to his own eyes, but female features framed them.

Armin’s jaw opened; this nightmare was only getting ridiculous with each passing minute.

There was no way Annie Leonhart was in a police officer attire and driving this car.

But she took off the hat, flung it outside the window, and her golden locks flew around her face, and Armin wasn’t mistaken; it was her, and her only.

Annie put a shushing finger on her lips, before she turned her gaze back on the road.

Armin slanted back in the seat, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> UM HELLO  
> ok wow I'm so excited that I've finally shared this with yall, it's really something new to me and certainly out of my comfort zone  
> I really hope you liked itand I hope I delivered the story in an understandable, clear way, because as I said, this is new to me, feedback is appreciated!!  
> OK HELLO GUYS COME JOIN ME ON TWITTER UWU  
> sometimes I post art there, warning: I'm not good at it  
> one last thing, this was written for Aruani week 2020 on tumblr, go through the hashtag and see what others created! really awesome art so I highly recommend  
> ok that's it have a good day/night  
> byyeeee


End file.
